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Thanks to Psy's ‘Gangnam Style’ smash hit, the South Korean music industry's long-held dream to make it big in Europe and the USA with its K-pop boy bands has taken a giant leap forward.

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But Psy's international success looks unlikely to have a big
knock-on effect in other Asian countries, experts said at the MIDEM
music industry gathering in Cannes.

To build on the momentum of the "Psy" phenomenon and showcase
some of their other big stars, South Korea's music industry has
turned out in force to attend the annual four-day trade fair that
opened its doors on Saturday.

"The Western markets have always been a kind of romantic dream
and an end goal for the South Korean record labels," Clayton Jin,
CEO of the country's most respected music data service, Billboard
Korea, told AFP.

"However, Korean labels are very realistic and Asia remains
their bread and butter," Jin stressed, adding that Asia continues
to be the region where the country's labels are most successful,
with Japan alone accounting for about 50% of Korea's music
exports.

gotaboy

It's only very recently that the South Korean music business has
started to eye up the US and European markets, Jin said in an
interview.

The first K-pop concerts held outside of Asia were organised in
the States and Europe in 2011 and did much to increase the musical
genre's popularity.

In terms of sales, however, the slick boy and girl-band routines
proved successful only in a handful of niche markets, industry
experts noted.

"The American market and the European market represented just
0.5 percent of South Korea's total music exports," Min Kim, who
heads up Kocca, a non-profit organisation that promotes the
country's content industry abroad, told AFP.

But all that changed when rapper Psy unexpectedly shot to fame
and his quirky
Gangnam Style video notched up a record one billion views
on YouTube.

"Before Psy, Western people associated Korea with IT, now with
Gangnam Style they associate the country with music," Kim
noted.

Psy's success has convinced many Western music industry insiders
and fans take a closer look at K-pop, he added.

"Now music fans are actually giving this music a chance whilst
before they thought it was just some ethnic music genre and didn't
pay much attention to it," Kim said.

Psy's success has also boosted the confidence of other Korean
artists and their management companies who didn't think it could be
financially viable to tour in Europe and the US, Jin added.

Today, the industry believes that with the right investments and
the right artists, they can make a meaningful push into these
markets, he said.

Psy has also had an impact on how the music industry operates in
his own country.

"Before, the artists' management companies had a very tight
control over their artists.

"But the reason why Psy succeeded where so many other Korean
artists failed was that he had a very open contract, so that as
soon as his
Gangnam Style single started taking off on YouTube, Psy
was able to move to the United States and sign with (new manager)
Scooter Braun," Jin said.

Other Korean artists are now clamouring to follow in Psy's
footsteps.

South Korean girl band Girls Generation has signed with
Interscope in the US, the label behind Lady Gaga and the Black Eyed
Peas, and is coming out with an English album in March.

But industry experts at the trade fair cautioned that the "Psy"
phenomenon was unlikely to be easily copied in other Asian music
markets -- or even at home.

Malaysia, for instance, faces a language barrier to promoting
their songs abroad as there are four different main languages in
the country and English is not widely used, the chairman of the
Recording Industry Association of Malaysia, Norman Abdul Halim,
told AFP.

South Korea's big music success in Japan may also be on the
wane, Japanese industry experts said here, as Japanese music fans
are starting to get bored of the pre-packaged Korean tunes and are
hungry for something new and fresh.

And Psy's success hasn't necessarily made things easier for
South Korean artists in other musical genres such as hip-hop and
dance, Tasha, the female vocalist of the band Drunken Tiger, told
AFP.

"In one way, it's made things even more difficult because a lot
of people now expect all Korean music to be like Psy's music," she
said with a wry smile.